Coalition Priorities Letter on Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Service (FISA 702)
Dear Speaker Johnson, Minority Leader Jeffries, Majority Leader Thune, Minority Leader Schumer:
As privacy and civil liberties advocates, we write to express the need for critical reforms to protect Americans’ privacy rights and guard against surveillance abuse as part of any extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA 702”). FISA 702 — a warrantless surveillance authority that collects the private communications of a huge number of Americans — is set to expire on April 30. It is essential that Congressional action on this issue close loopholes that are exploited to circumvent court approval.
FISA 702 has been repeatedly misused to deliberately pull up Americans’ private communications, and despite changes to the law enacted in 2024 broad misconduct continues: Over the past two years the government has used filter tools to run queries for Americans’ communications while avoiding requirements to audit those queries for misconduct.1 This means we do not even know how many queries for Americans’ communications have occurred over the past two years, and that malicious queries could be occurring without ever being audited or addressed.